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Friday, November 22, 2013

What do Wal-Mart and Arne Duncan have in common? Neither understands that it’s all about the wages

By Marc Jampole

Two stories floating
around the news media lately both make me want to shake the principal actors
and yell in their faces, “Raise wages and you’ll solve the problem.”

The first story
involves Wal-Mart’s latest embarrassment—employees in its Canton, Ohio
store organized a Thanksgiving food drive for fellow workers.This act of charity—by and for employees
only—begged the question that pundits, labor leaders, left-leaning actors and
supporters of the minimum wage are all asking: Does Wal-Mart pay its employees
too little money?

The Canton food
drive for Wal-Mart employees came on the heels of a report by Demos, the
liberal think tank, that if Wal-Mart had not engaged in a stock buy-back
program in recent years, it would have had the money to raise employee salaries by $5.83 an hour and kept the same profit. My only problem with the survey is that it
doesn’t attack the profit margin, which is pretty fat for Wal-Mart and could be
reduced to pay employees a living wage.

At this point,
Wal-Mart’s treatment of its employees has achieved near mythic notoriety in the
mainstream and the left-leaning media. The food drive is merely this week’s
“Wal-Mart doesn’t pay its employees enough” story. I’m sure many others are as
tired as I am of shouting at the paper, TV, radio or computer screen, “Just do
the decent thing and raise their salaries to $15 an hour!”

If Arne
Duncan doesn’t know it, maybe his friends at Microsoft and the multinational advertising
agencies involved in the Advertising Council could tell him that it’s a simple
matter to attract more—and more competent—people to a job or career. Just offer
more money.

I
suspect that Duncan is not entirely serious about attracting more people to the
teaching profession, given his continued support of charter schools. From day
one, the goal of the charter school movement has been to hammer down salaries
of teachers by destroying public school unions.We know that the big money funding the charter school movement doesn’t
really care about quality education. Otherwise they would have pulled the plug
on charter schools years ago, given that on average charter schools underperform public schools.

The
equation is simple:

Charter schools pay less

Thus, charter schools drive down teachers’ salaries

Lower teacher salaries decrease interest in becoming a
teacher.

If this esteemed group of government entities, companies and
nonprofit organizations really wanted to build the next generation of school
teachers, it would be bankrolling a campaign to make union organizing easier
and to set high federal wage standards for all school teachers, public and
private.

Both these stories come down to people with power scratching
their heads and wondering what to do when the answer is standing right in front
of them like a large cold and hungry elephant shivering and trumpeting loudly.
PAY THEM MORE! It may mean taking a little less in profits, which are currently
exorbitant. Or it may mean raising taxes. Doesn’t matter—those with jobs should
make enough money to feed their families, and the professionals to whom we
entrust our children should not have their decent wages reduced but instead be raised
to the same rate at which we pay lawyers, accountants and other professionals.
Pay teachers as much as we pay neurosurgeons and top PR execs, and we’ll have
more people interested in the profession.

If it weren’t for the entertainment value, I’d be pleased that Texas Governor Rick Perry is foundering in the Republican presidential race. After all, Governor Perry, who is in an unprecedented fourth term as chief executive of the nation's second-largest state, still might get the Republican nomination for president. If that happens there’s no telling what the voters might be fooled into doing. Just look at how far George W. Bush got.